The world today enjoys a wide variety of services provided over the network. These services range from browsing websites, streaming broadcast content, downloading media content, cloud storage of media, real-time communications, stock trading, big data computing, etc. These services are typically provided by computer systems and networking components which interconnect the computer systems. The networking components serve an important role of transporting data from one device to another device quickly, reliably, and efficiently.
One kind of networking component is a network switch. A network switch serves as a controller, enabling networked devices to talk to each other efficiently. While some small-scale switches are used to provide connectivity between devices in an office or a home, some high-performance switches are used in scenarios where information is to be exchanged at very high speeds. In one example, high-frequency financial trading often demand high network-access speed to accelerate critical functions such as market data delivery, price discovery, and best-trade execution. Latency demanded by high-frequency trading can be as low as 190 nanoseconds. Designing and operating such high performance network switches is not a trivial task, and often, these high performance network switches require sophisticated hardware to support such low latency requirements.